My New Chapter, My New Role

My New Role

The last days already contained the to-be-expected mix of exhilaration,
excitedness and strain (the good kind) from trying to cram as much things into
my head as possible in a short amount of time.

My new colleagues are the people from Crispy Mountain. Right
now, we’re working on Keyline, which can be described as
Software-as-a-Service that functions as the brain and backbone for printing
companies.
We are located in Mainz, and totally incidentally right around the corner from
my favorite coffee shop. Right now I’m commuting every day, but
will transition to several days remote working per week, once I feel I need less
support with all those tiny, magic bits of Rails.

My Last Weeks

Before I published the blog post, I shared it privately
with some people. One of them asked me if I set aside a day for answering all
the messages I’d get. Back then I thought he was joking, but soon realized that
I underestimated a lot of things. Beginning with the friendliness and number of
people who shared my search and wished me well. Thanks so much to you all.

It continued with the amount of interesting things happening around me. And the
trust people put into me, when approaching me with their endeavors and assuming,
that I could be a meaningful help for them. That assumption of competence was
really humbling, and a great privilege (being the white man that I am). Still
I’m thankful for having had as many chances and interesting conversations as I
had in the last weeks.

… all that while wrapping things up at vaamo. And about that：The people at
vaamo, not the least their new Head of Engineering Timo, really
helped me make time for all these conversations. Thank you! And thank you, dear
awesome vaamo team, for a great farewell party and these
amazing gifts

Super-Mega-Duper-Special-Thanks to Sebastian for making these
great guides and cards.

Oh, want one of these brew guides? Ping me and I’ll send you some.
They actually gave me a huge stack and not only one of them.And did you notice that cto.coffee at the bottom?

Why Crispy Mountain?

You mean, that name and logo wouldn’t have been enough to convince you? Well, I
can’t fathom why, but still there are more reasons for me, why Crispy Mountain
is the perfect choice for me right now.

One of them is: They’re people who care about people.

I had several contacts with Crispy Mountain before already, be it an
occasion to work at their lovely
office or meeting Christian at a
Techettes meetup, where I learned about the fact, that he coached
at a local RailsGirls event and at one instance of
RGSoC. In all these contact occasions I experienced them as friendly,
considerate and smart people.
And talking to them several times over the last weeks, confirmed and
strengthened that image.

Another reason is their approach to product development. Not only because of
their team size, but because they believe it, Crispy Mountain has a
no-bullshit1 approach to developing Keyline and working with
customers on eye level and in a productive partnerships2. I experienced it
from day one working with them and cherish it a lot, that it’s not just
lip-service.

Last and not least is the fact that Crispy Mountain gives me the opportunity to
dive into a new-for-me technology, as their products are mostly based on Ruby
and Rails.

I’ve wanted to work with Ruby for a while now, which for me also means to get to
know the Ruby Community, which I perceive as one of the friendliest and open
programming language communities out there. So I’m looking forward to expanding
my horizon not only technically, but also people-wise <3

In any case: If you want to know more about Crispy Mountain, got some nice Ruby
hints or links for me, don’t hesitate to reach out and tell me about
it.

Fun fact：Relatively soon after publishing my blog post, Matthias contacted me, more or less with an invitation to their slack team. That is, we exchanged one email, and all subsequent conversations happened via slack. Talk about no bullshit-attitude. ↩